I’m working a new project whose goal is really simple : making Asana’s users life easier by helping them setting up new tasks through the power of an AI.
The idea is that when you create a task, you would automatically have suggestion about potential assignee, the due date, tags, and a variety of other things (yet to be defined, happy to hear people’s actual needs on that !)

I am an AI developer and believe in the power of automation. I know that can sounds scary at first to “give up” some control on your tasks/projects, but rest assured that I don’t want to take the steering wheel away from you. In fact, that AI would take into account your preferences - eg : assign tasks based on experience / based on current workload / … I really aim at making your day-to-day less burdensome !

Of course, you will still have the last word, and if the assignee/tags on a task don’t meet your expectations, you can still override it as you would normally do right now.

I’m actually really interested as to what people think and how people imagine that tool to potentially integrate into their daily workflow. I’m happy to take any feedback and refine the idea based on suggestions !

Hi Paul,
Sounds great! I heard about a project management software which even creates the task for people, when hearing about a project, basically eliminating the work of many middle managers…
AIsana Feature, would be my name suggestion

Thanks for the feedback and he name suggestion. I have initially also thought about creating the tasks automatically but it would be a much more difficult thing to implement, and at first the relevance of the tasks created would not make it worth it, however I am considering the idea for a later version of the tool and will definitely include it onto my roadmap.

Thanks for sharing the video as well !

I’ll get back when I have more info on the tool, but if people have other ideas I’ll be glad to hear them all !

Brilliant idea.
The most pressing issue with assigning tasks, it to be able to assign multiple people.
In addition, it would be great to have a RACI (responsible, accountable, consulted, informed) option for assignments.
If Instagaant had RACI function also, AI could estimate work associated and allocate time to those individuals.
e.g.
Web Design:
Responsible : 20 hours
Accountable (the account manager / client laison: 4 hours.)
Consulted: (Design Feedback) 2 hours
Informed: Managing Director 1 hour.

I love this idea. Our team has project templates set up. If the tasks were already assigned when we added team members to the project this would minimize a huge chunk of our team’s set up process. Would it be like assigning individuals a certain level of access to the team so Asana would be able to make the assignment suggestion?

We actually tried to use tags with the RACI model, @Brett_Elliott , in an earlier version of our templates. We found that we did not have a very interactive team to maintain its use. However, if we could have the RACI in combination with ability to assign to multiple people, it could be more powerful. It did help our new project managers to our team understand who needed to be updated or involved in the task.

@Paul_Mayer - One tedious task that I would like to see is the ability to make more than 1 copy of a task. I manage my team’s daily stand up notes in Asana. I spend about 30 minutes per month manually creating the copies of tasks to make up 1 month’s worth of meeting containers. If there was a way to automate the creation of 1 month’s worth of meeting tasks, that would be awesome! Within each task there’s about 16 followers & subtasks (subtasks document their update for that day).

For the coming year, I decided to drop adding the day of the week (Monday, Tuesday, etc.) And started just assigning the actual date via the date selector:

@Brett_Elliott Just to clarify, I am not suggesting my AI could enable you to assign multiple people to the same task. That would be something to be done by the dev team at Asana. I’m sure you can suggest them to put that higher in their priority list as it seems many people have the same issue. However, as @Laura_Bush mentioned, my tool would enable you to assign people automatically (one per task) based on your preferences (could be based on level of access to the team, experience, …).

As for a RACI model, again, I believe it’s something that would be best integrated directly by the asana’s team.

Regarding copying more than one task, I agree with @rscina that it’s something that would be very useful and I’ll integrate it on the roadmap - let’s see if it makes the cut for the first version I’ll let you know when I finalize the roadmap.

I am quite often predictable in my actions in Asana. The tasks I’d like The Bot to help me do are:

add task to project

add me as follower

add someone as follower

remove me from followers

add tag

assign someone (if not assigned)

reassign task (high confidence of bot needed)

unassign task (high confidence of bot needed)

become project member

become team member

add someone as project member

add someone as team member

I’d like to have bot to perform actions as separate Asana User (helper), and provide ability for user to add own auth token from bot to be able to fetch data from the stream as “owner” user (to have access to all user’ tasks, not only teams/projects that bot is member of). The Helper would inspect history of my actions, and build its model (possibly even confirm it) from my past actions.

I’d train my model from smaller/simpler signals to more complex ones:

Initially I would depend only upon task metadata, and would help organize missing bits of metadata, in case one would miss something.

For simple feedback loop I’d have some web panel with list of suggestions that bot has and ability either to confirm or reject the proposal of a bot. Next step would be fetching these confirmations from the Asana Event stream (while bot is working in “shadow” mode). After bot has “significant” confidence in its actions I’d start applying actions in Asana proactively, without extra confirmation from a user. There should be prominent way for other team members to influence my bot, if the action that my bot has taken is insulting them (adding them as follower, or adding task to their project without their will). I’d additionally fetch these corrective actions from Asana Event stream as well (i.e. user removing project added by bot, user removing himself from being follower, or assignee).

It would be good to have Slack reporting of bot activity (activity log) as well, to monitor activity of a bot (with quick links to revert “high confidence” actions performed).

user vacation status, and vacation duration - to be able to correlate the way humans act with other’s leaves (reassigning, assigning bigger tasks to people on short leave, but smaller to other people, reassigning tasks that are due within the leave period, etc.)

level of user Asana activity (in task/project/team/organization), to be able to detect people focusing on some of the tasks that are leaving other tasks without attention (as candidate for extra followers, or reassignment), i.e. The Bot can learn this tactics from good manager that is rebalancing the load between the team members.

project owner. When project owner changes, it is necessary to “notice” it since it most probably direct future task assignments and reassignments.